So
says ARCH ENEMY guitarist Michael Amott when referring the band’s new
platter of mayhem, Khaos Legions. Not that they’ve ever tackled any
aspects of their career with a half-baked attitude, but the approach was
particularly important after four years of creative silence.

The band has been far from quiet since the 2007 release of Rise...
Of The Tyrant, of course. During the extensive tour cycle for the
album, ARCH ENEMY saw fit to preserve their trademark sonic violence on
the live 2008 record, Tyrants Of The Rising Sun, returning to the studio
a year later to re-record some of their early work and live fan
favourites for The Root Of All Evil. Amott will be the first to tell
you, however, that he and his bandmates have been waiting a long time to
create something brand new from the ground up.

“Root Of All
Evil was cool to do,” Amott insists, “but it wasn’t really creative at
all. None of that material was new to us. We were itching to get into
the studio and record all the things we’ve been talking about backstage
for the last few years. We knew we had to come back with something
really good because it’s been four years since the Rise Of The Tyrant
album. We’ve kept the fans waiting long enough.”

Khaos Legions
was well worth the wait. A solid 14 tracks – 11 songs and three
instrumental passages – it’s an album that immediately recalls Anthems
Of Rebellion (2003) and Doomsday Machine (2005), considered up to this
point to be ARCH ENEMY’s two strongest outings to date. Loaded with the
Amott brothers’ trademark guitar shred, spearheaded by vocalist Angela
Gossow’s instantly recognizable hell-hath-no-fury delivery, all backed
by the Sharlee D’Angelo / Daniel Erlandsson bass / drum high energy
stomp, Khaos Legions features the band’s trademark extreme metal
execution coupled with some eyebrow-raising surprises along the way.

Eight studio albums and 15 years into their career, Khaos Legions is
ARCH ENEMY’s iron “You are here!” stamp that hits like a ton of bricks.

“This album is kind of nuts,” says Amott. “It’s a very exciting record
for me because it encapsulates everything that Arch Enemy is about. It
was written over a four year period, so I think that’s why it’s got a
lot of depth and girth to it”

Simply put, no diehard ARCH ENEMY
fan should go away dissatisfied. The tracks ‘Yesterday Is Dead And
Gone’, ‘Under Black Flags We March’, ‘Thorns In My Flesh’ and ‘City Of
The Dead’ are examples of the five piece wrecking crew people have come
to expect. On the other side of the coin, ‘Bloodstained Cross’ features
Michael and Chris Amott exploring new shred-head territory, while
‘Cruelty Without Beauty’, ‘Cult Of Chaos’ and the scathing ‘Vengeance Is
Mine’ feature some of the most aggressive work from the band to date.

In addition, ‘Through The Eyes Of A Raven’ is easily the band’s most
adventurous song in years; progressive and dark, what Amott feels “has a
Scandinavian feel to it, with a melancholic Nordic thing going on in
the chorus.” Certainly a different side of the band, yet they retain
every ounce of trademark aggression.

The biggest surprise of
all, however, is the bordering-on-death-rock ‘No Gods, No Masters’, a
definite echo of ARCH ENEMY’s anthem ‘We Will Rise’ that is guaranteed
to raise the ire of some fans even as it is embraced by others.

Gossow sums Khaos Legions up in one sentence, unapologetic as always:
“We went all over the place with this album. Take it or leave it.”